A tape feeder that pitch-feeds a carrier tape housing electronic components to a pickup position of a mount head provided on a component mounting mechanism has hitherto been heavily used as a configuration for feeding electronic components in an electronic component mounting apparatus. The carrier tape is fed while wound around and accommodated in a feed reel. When a component shortage has occurred in the tape feeder, there is performed reel replacement for replacing an already-loaded feed reel with a new feed reel. A splicing system recently tends to be adopted into reel replacement (see Patent Documents 1 and 2). The splicing system is intended for splicing a leading head of a carrier tape wound around a new feed reel to a tail end of the already-loaded carrier tape by splicing means, such as tape pasting means, when component shortage has occurred as a result of consumption of a carrier tape wound around one feed reel. The system yields an advantage of enabling replacement of a reel while the electronic component mounting apparatus maintains operation.
Since the splicing system splices two separate carrier tapes together, a difference occurs between an operating state in which an electronic component is picked up from an already-loaded carrier tape with a mount head and another operating state in which an electronic component is picked up from a newly-spliced carrier tape with the mount head. For this reason, the component mounting apparatus adopting the splicing system requires processing for making a correction on pickup conditions due to such a difference in operating state.
Under the related art described in connection with; for instance, Patent Document 1, every time a joint between the carrier tapes is detected, there are updated component pickup position data that are data used for making a positional correction when pickup nozzles of the mount head pick up the electronic components. This makes it possible to make corrections to positional displacement of electronic components within a horizontal plane of the electronic components attributable to splicing of the carrier tapes. Under the related art described in connection with Patent Document 2, when a joint is detected in a component feeding configuration that mixedly splices an embossed tape and a non-embossed tape together as a carrier tape, a determination is made as to whether a new carrier tape is an embossed tape or a non-embossed tape. A component pickup height for pickup nozzles is switched on the basis of a determination result. Thereby, a correction can be made to an error in component pickup height due to a difference in tape type.